


Like a Moth to the Flame

by Darth_Videtur



Series: Master and Apprentice [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Darth Plagueis - James Luceno, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: 18 year old Palpatine, Apprentice Palpatine, Cold Weather, Daydreaming, M/M, One-Sided Attraction, Plagueis thinks about a lot of things, Pre-Slash, Settle down Plagueis, Showers, Sith Shenanigans, Sith Training, Voyeurism, mostly about his redhead apprentice, who is proving very distracting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-05
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-09-28 09:42:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10088066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darth_Videtur/pseuds/Darth_Videtur
Summary: Curiosity begins to get the better of a Muun when the Sith Master and his young Apprentice set out on a training mission in the far reaches of the galaxy. Set about a year before Breaking, Breaking, Broken? .





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [[Translation]Like a Moth to the Flame飞蛾扑火](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10962102) by [isaakfvkampfer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/isaakfvkampfer/pseuds/isaakfvkampfer)



Palpatine was not an easy human to sway, Plagueis thought as he watched his young apprentice battle ring after ring of powerful assassin droids with a Force pike on the ancient snow-covered grounds of the former Sith Temple. The Temple, long swept away by time, once claimed dominion over this forgotten world where the current Sith pair trained in secret.

 

One of many worlds that Damask Holdings possessed, Plagueis smiled, though no official records ever showed these tiresome matters.

 

Yet there was something he wished to possess more than one thousand such worlds, though his fellow business-muuns would have looked at him askance and horrified.

 

What could be greater than profit? Greater than possessions and prestige?

 

How little his own people knew, but _he_ knew. He stared at it now as its lean figure of a mere eighteen years dipped and dived between its opponents with perfect accuracy. No, Plagueis thought, amused. Not quite perfect, a bolt singed the right shoulder, and the master smiled to hear the colorful Naboo curse spat from bared teeth. The human’s anger fed his determination to drive the droid back against the Temple wall with a powerful Force push where its casing shattered under the blow.

 

Plagueis smiled wider. Such raw power!

 

As the boy grew from a thin stick of a human who ate little and spent his days in academic textbooks to a thin cord of pure wiry muscles beaten by endless trials into perfect power, so too the Lord of the Sith felt his interest increasing toward his little human. Other Muuns whispered of rumors about Hego Damask and his curious tastes in pleasure, but nothing solid could ever be claimed. If someone tried, it never ended well for them.

 

Yet for the most part Plagueis had simple tastes, contrary to what the others gossiped. He liked smooth skin and lean shapes, long arms and pale flesh. Really, only one peculiarity set him apart from the others of his race: where other Muuns recoiled in dignified disgust, he found himself fascinated by human hair, red human hair in particular, like the hair of his apprentice, long and soft and tangled now from the exertions of his leaps and bounds to escape his punishing enemies.

 

Plagueis had touched it several times. Once he pulled the boy to his feet by his hair after a thorough beating on Mustafar almost a year ago. He noticed then how the color reflected the glow of the lava far below, the glow of freshly golden eyes fixed on him in sullen resentment. He remembered smoothing the hair down after setting the seventeen year old back on his feet.  

 

Once he had touched it when Sidious lay unconscious at the bottom of a cliff on Naboo, nearly killed by a raging narglatch protecting its cub. The narglatch itself lay dead on the boy’s legs, his vibroblade buried in its looped guts spilled on the dark earth. Plagueis itched to stop the bleeding from Sidious’s broken body, but he did not, for a Sith Apprentice could not receive the aid of the Master in times like these. Sidious proved strong enough to live in the end and receive medical care aboard their ship, but for hours Plagueis knelt with the human’s head in his lap, curling elongated fingers through the soft curls. Glorious. Here in the mud of the trampled ground, Palpatine’s red hair gleamed like fire.

 

He found himself more and more curious about the rest of his apprentice’s body, if the hair showed in other places, if it would be the same perfect red all over. A scientific curiosity only. He wondered what that pale skin would look like if he could see more of it, all of it. He had seen portions before, like the time Sidious frantically removed his tunic to escape the brutal stings of the fire-bugs of Yutusk – how Plagueis had laughed! – or the time early on when Plagueis tore the envirosuit wide open and exposed his apprentice to the freezing air of Mygeeto and watched him struggle half naked across the tundra on bruised hands and knees and belly.

 

Or the time he found his apprentice sleeping naked one hot summer night on Naboo, tangled in a light sheet around his slender hips.

 

He hadn’t laughed then; he had simply looked. The temptation conquered, the wait reinstated.

 

If the rest of the boy was anything like his nearly hairless torso… Nearly hairless, Plagueis mused, because he had observed a thin line of red each of those times, starting just under the apprentice’s navel and disappearing out of sight beyond the band of his trousers. Curiosity was an elemental function of a Muun’s life, and Plagueis made his species proud in that department. His scientific drive to find answers, to develop theories, to prove them, led to a new drive to discover exactly what secrets his human apprentice had to offer.

 

That was all.

 

He was a delicate boy, though, haughty and proud and untouched by what Plagueis could sense, and if Plagueis merely took what he wanted too early, then all would be for naught. Palpatine required a cautious taming to bring his inner beast to heel. Several years of training, and perhaps he would be ready to accept his master’s advances.

 

In the meantime, Plagueis sought to assuage his curiosity.

 

The Force pike clattered to the stones at his feet, and he looked up to see his apprentice smiling in his strange way, breathless and proud, the assassin droids smoking heaps of refuse behind him. Blood dripped down over one pale blue eye. Muuns never had that eye color. “I’m finished, Master,” Sidious said. He did not kneel, protocol forgotten in his victory, too proud.

 

“Impressive,” Plagueis smirked and then dropped the rest of his sentence. “You took an extra minute this time.”

 

Palpatine tossed his head back. “The handle was broken. I was forced to make some last minute changes.”

 

“Still, more time is more time. You know what that means.”

 

He did. It meant another grueling journey through the planet’s roughest canyons and caves, battling off the hordes of disgruntled cave-dwelling creatures who thought to make a feast of him.

 

Plagueis noted the flicker of a dismayed expression and stood to his feet. “We need to cross the Gorges in any case. Our mission requires it. Get your things, my apprentice, and we will depart immediately.”

 

Sidious dipped his head and bounded back toward the ruins of the Temple to collect the duo’s supplies.

 

x

 

They traveled for hours through the sub-frozen temperatures until Plagueis could feel the young man behind him pulling on the Force for strength. He did not bother to scold him. Any other human might have collapsed many kilometers ago, but Sidious set his pace and kept up with his Master. Not for the first time, Plagueis wondered what traumas the young Naboo had experienced in his brief years to inspire such stubbornness.

 

Whatever it was, he thanked the Force for his ready-made apprentice.

 

Two hours later, and after observing his apprentice fish himself out of a half-frozen lake, Plagueis decided to alieve the shielded agony of his companion, stopping in his tracks and looking around the narrow gorge. “We will stop here for the night, Lord Sidious. These mountains are filled with warm spring caves. Find one that will suit us, and you may rest for the evening.”

 

Sidious looked at him, mouth and chin covered in a thick ice-encrusted thermoscarf and silent to save his energy and body heat, then nodded and trotted past his master. Plagueis watched the unsteady weaving trail he left in the snow, small footprints tracking sideways up the mountain’s slope.   

 

The Sith Lord settled into a cross-legged pose of meditation and sank into the Force, ruminating on the suppressed, tired anger of his apprentice as Palpatine struggled up the steep mountainside and disappeared among the craggy outcroppings. Sidious proved an endless source of strength in this area; he always _burned_ with dark purpose.

 

How refreshing it was to no longer be alone in the universe. He remembered the hunt for a worthy apprentice not so long ago, the disappointment of the Prophetess, the gambler, even poor foolish Venamis. For a time, he worried that the Force had turned its back on him.

 

On the contrary, the Force had hidden the best away, on a tiny, insignificant planet.

 

Less than half a standard hour later, Palpatine reemerged and slid down the mountain to his master, where he breathlessly reported the existence of a suitable cave. They ascended together, and Plagueis looked at the small cave and turned to his apprentice with a faint smile of praise. 

 

"This will do. Well scouted." 

 

Beside him, tattered, bloody, exhausted, and bleeding in several places from the creatures set upon him, his apprentice nodded. 

 

"Thank you, Master." 

 

Plagueis noted the pride in that deepening voice, so luring and soft-spoken. Palpatine obviously thought he had pleased his master, and in his half asleep state failed to notice how Plagueis allowed his gaze to drift down over the young man. The Sith Master then glanced over the cave, taking in its features. Several "rooms" had formed from glacial movements of eons ago, and a small waterfall from one of the planet's hot springs cascaded down the back of one such chamber. The water pooled and slipped away through a large crevice on the right of the room.

 

Plagueis looked from it to Sidious and nodded. "Clean yourself up, my apprentice. You are filthy."

 

Sidious's eyes widened. "Here?"

 

He pointed at the small gap leading to the second room. "There is water. And your clothing is soaked anyway."

 

Pausing only a moment, Sidious nodded and headed for the back of the cave, pulling his ice-crackling tunic over his head and revealing a torso covered in cuts and wiry muscles.

 

Plagueis backed away so that he could not be seen, but he could still watch. He pulled a shroud over his presence in the Force. To his apprentice, it would only seem that he had returned to the front of the cave, that he could bathe in privacy. When Palpatine arrived at the waterfall after setting down his pack and vibroblade on a natural rock shelf, the young human stood looking doubtfully up. Tentatively, he reached out a hand and ran it through the steady flow. To his obvious surprise, the water was indeed warm to the touch, fed by the fires deep under the surface.

 

Plagueis sucked in his breath sharply when Sidious finally reached down and undid his belt, sliding both trousers and undergarment down over his slim hips. The hidden Muun could not tear his eyes away from the firm curve of pale buttocks and sculpted lean thighs. He nearly sighed when Palpatine, unaware, bent to pull his boots off, lifting one leg as he balanced expertly and inadvertently revealing to his lurking master a brief glimpse of a smooth perineum and tight rosebud hole between smooth cheeks, pink and inviting and almost certainly untouched.

 

Unclaimed. The boy moved with too much innocence, too much arrogance, to be otherwise. In his studies of the noble’s checkered past, a lover had never factored into the equation.

 

The Sith Lord clutched at his self-control. Truly, the slender human was beautifully made with his curls of red hair and fragile white skin dotted in faint patterns of freckles along his face and shoulders. Truly, that secret place between those shivering legs must be warm and a firm fit like nothing he ever felt before. He imagined sliding out from behind the rock formation, unveiling his presence in the Force, striding forward to take those narrow hips in his hands and force the boy up. He could so easily see the slender fingers splayed against rough stone for balance, could see his massive cock pressing in and making his little apprentice whimper in pain.

 

Sidious would hate it now.

 

He watched the boy step fully into the spray of the water, shuddering as the warm water struck his pebbled skin and beginning to scrub the dried blood and grime away. Palpatine turned, and Plagueis now saw his small nest of pubic hair, bright red and framing a straight cock and small, almost hairless testicles. Not much hair, but enough to excite the curious passions of the unusual Muun.

 

And the colors matched _perfectly_.

 

He looked closer. The young Sith’s manhood was cut in the tradition of the ancient Naboo, his well-formed, exposed glans glistening limply in the spray. Plagueis thought it would fit perfectly in his large hand and imagined Sidious bucking up into his hard grip, whining with each twist of the Muun's powerful long fingers. 

 

Since meeting this dark nexus in the Force on Naboo, Plagueis had thought about fucking him. In the past, their conversations often bordered on the flirtatious until the day he had accepted the boy as Apprentice, and now the naked vision he saw increased the hard need in his blood. Would Sidious be wanton and loud, like a desperate whore under his master? Or would he be quiet and sullen, taking each thrust with deliberate indifference? Would he adore the size and skill of his master?  

 

Sith didn't often take their apprentices as lovers. Intimacy made things messy and dangerous. It raised emotions, left hearts and other parts vulnerable. Could he fuck his little human and still maintain a careful distance? Of course, Plagueis mused, if he stripped the boy completely naked each time before taking him to his chambers, a lightsaber would be difficult to conceal. A naked, ashamed apprentice was also an easily controlled apprentice.

 

Like right now. Sidious’s vibroblade lay on the rock half a dozen meters away, a rookie’s mistake to let his weapon get so far away. Someday he would be true Sith and need no other weapon than the Dark Side of the Force.

 

He watched Sidious slowly reach down and wrap one slender hand around his cock, cleaning it with careful detachment just like the rest of him, and perhaps Plagueis only imagined the way those small fingers lingered on the pale flesh. He watched the boy touch himself slowly, carefully, before letting go and moving on to his thighs, still soft and unaroused. So, unlike other young males, his apprentice did not seem to possess the fabled overactive human “sex drive.”

 

Plagueis shifted uncomfortably. His own drive made its appearance in force, straining against his trousers and begging to be unleashed on the unsuspecting young body presented before him like a feast. Even now, Palpatine’s head tilted back with a soft, satisfied sigh as the water streamed over his skin. Plagueis could slip between the rocks, go to his apprentice, bend him over. Sidious would be surprised, would struggle, and the struggle would keep him tight for his master’s pleasure.  

 

But no… now was not the right time. Reluctantly, Plagueis retreated from his vantage point and set about setting up their camp for the night. He had seen the boy now, almost every centimeter of him, and it pleased him immensely to find such perfection under all those layers of clothes. All that remained was to get that perfect body under his, to see the rest of it at his leisure, to touch him, to train him to writhe at this touch and beg for his length, to arch against him and sigh and moan with wanton desire.

 

In time, he would have even that. And perhaps a few personal modifications later on to improve this perfection. For now, he needed to be patient.

 

He dug in Palpatine’s pack for the fire starters and fuel, and before long he had a small camping fire roaring cheerfully in the main room. Stepping back to admire his work, he turned and padded boldly back into the other passage. Palpatine jerked when he spotted his tall master approaching, his hands dropping from scrubbing at his chest to curl around his cock modestly. “M-Master?” he stammered, stepping away from the water and speechless for once in his erudite life. It was startlingly gratifying to steal the speech of a budding politician. After all, Sidious hardly ever found himself at a loss for words.

 

Yet Plagueis acted as though nothing were amiss. With the power of his training, he ignored the alluring sight of cold-hardened pink nipples, the shivering taut flesh. He strode to the tunic, trousers, and undergarment on the ground a meter from his apprentice, gathered them up, and straightened. “We’ll dry these by the fire, or you’ll be at risk of merely freezing again once you put them back on. Join me when you finish washing up.”

 

The young Naboo blushed. “Yes, of course.” He watched, forlorn, as his master carried his wet clothes away.

 

Plagueis grinned all the way back to the fire. Such a modest little apprentice he had. Humans were so strangely protective of their skin, always had been to hear their history. Perhaps because it was so tender, so easily torn, but that did not explain the dark blush when others looked upon their nakedness. A social conditioning, most likely. He smirked. Muuns dressed conservatively, but there was none of the confusion about their bodies that humans broadcasted, self-conscious and shamed and cringing.

 

The Naboo in particular seemed determined to hide their flesh under countless layers of fabric.

 

Someday he would break Sidious of such absurd mental blocks as he had already broken him of the other chains society had placed on him. But for now, he could only afford to observe. For now, he would enjoy the sight of a drying, naked, vulnerable apprentice on a cold and profitable evening.

 

The mission had suddenly grown much more enjoyable.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Don’t do it, Plagueis… but thanks to the subtext we all know he did it. :/ Poor Palpatine.  
> 2\. But at least we know that misbehaving Muun has very good tastes…  
> 3\. I’m working on several of my stories, and I’m a good ways into the next part/chapter of the Padme/Palpatine series. It gets so complicated so quickly. xD


End file.
